There has been a remarkable surge in the use of algorithms and artificial intelligence to address a wide range of problems and challenges. While their adoption, particularly with the rise of AI, is reshaping nearly every industry sector, discipline, and area of research, such innovations often expose unexpected consequences that involve new norms, new expectations, […]
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Huge libraries of drug compounds may hold potential treatments for a variety of diseases, such as cancer or heart disease. Ideally, scientists would like to experimentally test each of these compounds against all possible targets, but doing that kind of screen is prohibitively time-consuming. In recent years, researchers have begun using computational methods to screen […]
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Socrates once said: “It is not the size of a thing, but the quality that truly matters. For it is in the nature of substance, not its volume, that true value is found.” Does size always matter for large language models (LLMs)? In a technological landscape bedazzled by LLMs taking center stage, a team of […]
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Researchers from MIT, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, IBM Research, and elsewhere have developed a new technique for analyzing unlabeled audio and visual data that could improve the performance of machine-learning models used in applications like speech recognition and object detection. The work, for the first time, combines two architectures of self-supervised learning, contrastive learning […]
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When interacting with another person, you likely spend part of your time trying to anticipate how they will feel about what you’re saying or doing. This task requires a cognitive skill called theory of mind, which helps us to infer other people’s beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions. MIT neuroscientists have now designed a computational model […]
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Someone learning to play tennis might hire a teacher to help them learn faster. Because this teacher is (hopefully) a great tennis player, there are times when trying to exactly mimic the teacher won’t help the student learn. Perhaps the teacher leaps high into the air to deftly return a volley. The student, unable to […]
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When machine-learning models are deployed in real-world situations, perhaps to flag potential disease in X-rays for a radiologist to review, human users need to know when to trust the model’s predictions. But machine-learning models are so large and complex that even the scientists who design them don’t understand exactly how the models make predictions. So, […]
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On April 24, MIT celebrated outstanding students and employees at the annual Change-Maker Awards for their diligent work to eradicate sexual misconduct and support survivors. These architects of positive change exemplify one of MIT’s core values: striving to make our community a more humane and welcoming place where all can thrive. Hosted by MIT Violence […]
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Imagine you’re enjoying a picnic by a riverbank on a windy day. A gust of wind accidentally catches your paper napkin and lands on the water’s surface, quickly drifting away from you. You grab a nearby stick and carefully agitate the water to retrieve it, creating a series of small waves. These waves eventually push […]
Read More Imagine you’re enjoying a picnic by a riverbank on a windy day. A gust of wind accidentally catches your paper napkin and lands on the water’s surface, quickly drifting away from you. You grab a nearby stick and carefully agitate the water to retrieve it, creating a series of small waves. These waves eventually push […]
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In computer graphics and computer-aided design (CAD), 3D objects are often represented by the contours of their outer surfaces. Computers store these shapes as “thin shells,” which model the contours of the skin of an animated character but not the flesh underneath. This modeling decision makes it efficient to store and manipulate 3D shapes, but […]
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A robot manipulating objects while, say, working in a kitchen, will benefit from understanding which items are composed of the same materials. With this knowledge, the robot would know to exert a similar amount of force whether it picks up a small pat of butter from a shadowy corner of the counter or an entire […]
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Whether you are a new employee, a gymnast, or a bendy straw manufacturer, one trait is ideal across the board: flexibility. The same can now be said about prototyping electronic devices. While designers typically test out their designs on “breadboards,” or thin plastic boards that can hold together electronic components, they are often stiff and […]
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The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) recently announced the recipients of its Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) awards for 2023. This year, MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) professors George Barbasthasis and John Hart, MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Assistant Professor Pulkit Agrawal, and MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering […]
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The advent of generative artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT has prompted renewed calls for AI in health care, and its support base only appears to be broadening. The second annual MIT-MGB AI Cures Conference, hosted on April 24 by the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (Jameel Clinic), saw its attendance nearly […]
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Thirteen MIT undergraduates, graduate students, and alumni have been awarded Fulbright fellowships and will embark on projects overseas in the 2023-24 grant year. Four other MIT affiliates were offered awards but declined them to pursue other opportunities. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program offers American citizen students and recent […]
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The National Academy of Sciences has elected 120 members and 23 international members, including five faculty members from MIT. Joshua Angrist, Gang Chen, Catherine Drennan, Dina Katabi, and Gregory Stephanopoulos were elected in recognition of their “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.” Membership to the National Academy of Sciences is one of the highest […]
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Words, data, and algorithms combine, An article about LLMs, so divine. A glimpse into a linguistic world, Where language machines are unfurled. It was a natural inclination to task a large language model (LLM) like CHATGPT with creating a poem that delves into the topic of large language models, and subsequently utilize said poem as an introductory […]
Read MoreIn an effort to improve fairness or reduce backlogs, machine-learning models are sometimes designed to mimic human decision making, such as deciding whether social media posts violate toxic content policies. But researchers from MIT and elsewhere have found that these models often do not replicate human decisions about rule violations. If models are not trained […]
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Imagine sitting on a park bench, watching someone stroll by. While the scene may constantly change as the person walks, the human brain can transform that dynamic visual information into a more stable representation over time. This ability, known as perceptual straightening, helps us predict the walking person’s trajectory. Unlike humans, computer vision models don’t […]
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Researchers often use simulations when designing new algorithms, since testing ideas in the real world can be both costly and risky. But since it’s impossible to capture every detail of a complex system in a simulation, they typically collect a small amount of real data that they replay while simulating the components they want to […]
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Since the term “soft robotics” was adopted in 2008, engineers in the field have been building diverse representations of flexible machines useful in exploration, locomotion, rehabilitation, and even space. One source of inspiration: the way animals move in the wild. A team of MIT researchers has taken this a step further, developing SoftZoo, a bio-inspired […]
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Big ideas took the stage on Monday morning, ahead of the inauguration of MIT’s 18th president, Sally Kornbluth. As final preparations were underway on Killian Court for the afternoon’s ceremonies, members of the MIT community gathered to welcome Kornbluth with an academic symposium exploring the theme “Where Big Ideas Come From — and Why They […]
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Property assessments sit at the center of home appraisals, insurance claims, renovation projects, and a number of other important processes. Inaccurate or delayed assessments can set projects back and stick consumers with higher costs. Now, a platform first developed at MIT makes creating detailed property assessments as easy as snapping a few pictures. The alumni-founded […]
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MIT associate professors Ellen Roche of the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) and Justin Solomon of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) have been named the 2023 winners of MIT’s annual Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award. Established in fall 1982, the award exists as a permanent tribute to the late Institute […]
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In the vast, expansive skies where birds once ruled supreme, a new crop of aviators is taking flight. These pioneers of the air are not living creatures, but rather a product of deliberate innovation: drones. But these aren’t your typical flying bots, humming around like mechanical bees. Rather, they’re avian-inspired marvels that soar through the […]
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Yael Tauman Kalai PhD ’06, an MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) adjunct professor, member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research has been awarded the 2022 ACM Prize in Computing for “breakthroughs in verifiable delegation of computation and fundamental contributions to […]
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The emergence of generative artificial intelligence has ignited a deep philosophical exploration into the nature of consciousness, creativity, and authorship. As we bear witness to new advances in the field, it’s increasingly apparent that these synthetic agents possess a remarkable capacity to create, iterate, and challenge our traditional notions of intelligence. But what does it […]
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Sometime in 2019, MIT PhD student Ajay Brahmakshatriya formulated a simple, though still quite challenging, goal. He wanted to make it possible for people who had expertise in a particular domain — such as climate modeling, bioinformatics, or architecture — to write their own programming languages, so-called domain-specific languages (or DSLs), even if they had […]
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Each year, MIT’s School of Engineering gives the Junior Bose Award to a junior faculty member who has made outstanding contributions as an educator. The award is given to a member of faculty who is up for promotion from assistant professor to associate professor without tenure. The 2023 Junior Bose Award has been given to […]
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Inspired by the human finger, MIT researchers have developed a robotic hand that uses high-resolution touch sensing to accurately identify an object after grasping it just one time. Many robotic hands pack all their powerful sensors into the fingertips, so an object must be in full contact with those fingertips to be identified, which can […]
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